Don’t Be Afraid to Start Over

By Andrea Barrett

May 5, 2014

The best writing advice I ever got was extremely simple, initially devastating but actually incredibly kind, liberating, and utterly transformative. It came at Bread Loaf, the first writers’ conference I attended, where I went as a contributor the summer before I turned 30. After workshopping my story, Nicholas Delbanco—a brilliant teacher, as well as a wonderful writer—asked me if I’d written anything else and, when I confessed to having with me the manuscript of a novel I’d been writing and revising for almost six years, offered to read it.

Only much later, teaching at conferences myself, did I fully appreciate what an unusual and generous gesture that was: who asks for extra reading when immersed in a sea of student manuscripts? Nick read my grubby pages, promptly met with me to discuss them, and gently let me know that the novel on which I’d spent so long was rubbish. I had to teach for years to grasp the unusual generosity of that, too: how hard it is to give a tough opinion!

The news came deftly padded with reassurance about my probable ability to write, the not-bad story I had written, the things I’d learned writing all those drafts, which would surely help me with what I wrote next, but the kernel of his advice was simple: Throw it out, and move on. Take all you learned writing that and make something new. Afterwards I cried, I fussed, I crashed around—and then I did what he said. What a huge relief to shed those mauled and tortured pages! And how quickly, freed from them, did I begin to write again. First a stab at one new novel, which I discarded almost gaily after nine months’ work, realizing it too was wrong; and then another, which would become my first published novel, Lucid Stars.

That advice made me a writer: both in the specific moment (I couldn’t throw out that book until someone I trusted made me; I couldn’t write something better until I did) and since then as a guiding principle. I throw out things all the time, still; sometimes things on which I have, as I did with that first novel, spent not only months but years. What’s important, what the attempt taught me about writing, the material I’m exploring, where I want to go next, always survives.

Andrea Barrett is the author of Archangel (a finalist for the Story Prize), Servants of the Map (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Ship Fever (winner of the National Book Award), and other books. She teaches at Williams College and lives in northwestern Massachusetts.

THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

Greta Austin’s aunt spent 60 years in her old Victorian house and never changed a thing, living vicariously through her family and her own memories. The act of remembering for Aunt Lillian “was not just recollection of the past; it was all of experience, all of herself, which she then considered, organized, classified, and stored.” She never had to renovate her home because, in St. Augustine’s words, memory was its own house, full of rooms in which to store images and experiences. Read Austin’s loving and poetic tribute to her aunt from our Winter 2012 issue.